CLEVELAND, Ohio - The newest acquisitions on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art are a pair of large, gilded Thomas Chippendale candle stands made for Brocket Hall, an English estate with a racy, Downton Abbey-style history.

The candle stands, or torchères, went on view Friday in the museum’s gallery 203A, devoted to British art and furniture, flanking the 1794 Thomas Lawrence “Portrait of Catherine Grey (Lady Manners).”

“They’re really fantastic pieces and I’m so happy to have them,” said Stephen Harrison, the museum’s curator of decorative art and design.

The museum bought the candle stands at auction in July at Christie’s in London for $640,000, after they were offered for sale by Washington, D.C. developer and art collector S. Jon Gerstenfeld, according to the auction house’s website.

Harrison said he considers the stands, which stand five feet high, to be consummate examples of Chippendale’s genius as a designer.

Chippendale (1718-1779) was the pre-eminent English furniture maker and designer of his day, providing goods for royalty and the wealthy during the reigns of George II and George III, the English king during the American Revolution.

Harrison said he sought the candle stands as part of his mission to expand the museum’s collection of British furniture.

Decorated with neoclassical ornamentation and images of Diana, the ancient Roman goddess of the hunt, the candle stands are excellent examples of the 18th-century British craze for all things Greek and Roman, prompted in part by the recent discoveries of the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy.

Harrison said the columnar stands “are completely laden with acanthus leaves from top to bottom, beautifully arrayed with an almost mathematical use of fluting.”

He also praised the carved lion heads at the bases of the stands. The mouths of the lions “are slightly open and their cheeks are bulging,” he said. “In the hands of anyone else, they would have been flatly rendered. The carving is extraordinary.”

Chippendale made the candle stands in 1773 for Sir Peniston Lamb, 1st Viscount Melbourne, for the grand drawing room, or saloon, of Brocket Hall, a 30-bedroom country house in Hertfordshire, a county north of London.

With 543 acres of grounds, Brocket Hall was a favorite visiting spot for Queen Victoria, according to numerous accounts.

Brocket Hall’s history also included an affair between Lady Caroline Lamb, wife of the second Lord Melbourne, and the British poet, Lord Byron.

Widely published rumors hold that Lord Palmerston, the mid-19th century prime minister who led Britain into the first Opium War in China, died in 1865 while seducing a maid on a billiard table at Brocket Hall.

The latest Lord Brocket sold the candle stands to Gerstenfeld in 1995 just before pleading guilty to filing phony insurance claims on a collection of Ferraris that he falsely claimed had been stolen from Brocket Hall.

The estate is now leased by a Chinese billionaire who runs its two golf courses and rents it out for weddings, according to the website This is Money.

The Cleveland museum plans to exhibit photos of Brocket Hall next to the candle stands, imparting something of the estate’s aura to the new acquisitions.

But Harrison said he’s hoping most of all that the objects surprise visitors accustomed to associating Chippendale with ball-and-claw chairs or elaborate cabinets.

“I wanted something that would make people think, ‘wow I never knew he did things like that,’ ’’ he said.

That’s why he made a pitch for the museum to buy the candle stands at the Christie’s auction.